Interview with New Beat Fund on the Van’s Warped Tour 2013 August 20, 2013

Button: My name is Button I play guitar.
Benny: I’m Benny Baker the hit maker and I’m lead vocals and guitar.
Silky: My name is Silky and I just burped.
Snapz: I’m Snapz and play funky bass.

TNT: How has your experience been on Warped Tour?
Silky: Warped Tour has been absolutely amazing. This is our very first tour as a band so being thrown into Warped Tour specifically has been absolutely insane. We feel like if we can get through this type of tour, we’re set.

Klone: Kind of hit the ground running, right?
Silky: Exactly. We just got thrown in.
Benny: Like boot camp.
Silky: We started out with three weeks on the tour and then got added to the whole tour.
Button: Glad to be here in New York.

Klone: So what’s the eye-opening experience of boot camp like then? What’s the first shocker you experienced on your first tour?
Snapz: I would say the shocker was playing in Vegas and on stage it was like 120° and I almost passed out.
Benny: He almost passed out, I put a water bottle on the black top and it literally melted the water bottle and all my water poured all over the ground. That’s how hot the blacktop was.

Klone: Was that because you guys were playing on the blacktop?
Button: Yeah! We brought the heat! We turned it up, we’re like “this shit ain’t hot enough let’s turn this shit up. Bam!”
Silky: Before we started playing, it was a cool 72°.
Button: As Vegas normally is.
Snapz: With a chance of showers. Then the clouds parted, in came New Beat Fund.

TNT: Tell us about the new album.
Silky: It’s actually a six-track EP called CoiNz. We released it right before Warped Tour. It’s available for free on our website.
Button: Please enjoy and spread to friends!
Snapz: And actually, our site is hot-boxed! So you go on our website, you can clear the smoke with your curser and then you can hotbox other people’s websites.
Benny: Yeah, there’s a little button on the bottom right-hand corner. If you click “hotbox it,” it opens up a little thing and you type in anybody’s website, like your buddy’s website or whatever you want to hotbox. It can be the NYPD website.
Silky: Everybody please hotbox the NYPD’s website.
Klone: Freedom of choice and freedom of speech, so I think we should stand up for it.
Benny: And then post it on Instagram for all your friends to see.

TNT: I love the song “Scare Me.” How did the video shoot go?
Silky: It was a great time. Yeah it was awesome. We basically kind of produced the entire video on our own. It was the first song we ever recorded as a band and the first video as a band and we did it all on our own, we just want to keep it real, show people our lives in LA and along the way we picked up a crazy-ass ghost friend.
Benny: Ghost amigo.
Button: And to be honest with you, it was all really fun until ghosty, he got a little too…
Benny: He started smacking girls’ asses at the end of the party and bitches got cray, he got cray, a couple people lost some limbs and a couple people got stabbed.
Silky: It got real.
TNT: Shit went down.
Snapz: Actually, a girl got hit in the head by a giant cock.
Klone: Well, it’s not a party until that happens.
Snapz: I’m actually referring to a rooster that fell off the roof. But she did get hit by a cock.

Klone: Do you think the fact that there are so many things that are really scary out there, is that sort of a common plane for you guys when you started to come together as a band? Is that why that’s the first song you recorded?
Benny: Yeah, we were coming out of some shit when the lyrics to that song were written, a lot of turmoil I suppose. We like to make light of it as a comedian would, I mean obviously we spill out what we think and how we feel, but we don’t want to be like ‘this is exactly how you should feel’ and stuff like that. A lot of kids love the song, but maybe haven’t even caught on to the full message of the song yet. So, I think as time goes on, the more music we produce in a similar light, more people will catch on to it.
Silky: Definitely as people we observe what’s going on in the world and observe what’s going on around us and just being alive is crazy in itself, so we just kind of bring it to music.

TNT: We appreciate you not being posers.
Snapz: We do pose for photos.
Benny: We’re actually great posers in that sense.

TNT: What has been your craziest experience with a fan?
Silky: There was a weird moment on Warped Tour; our goal was to hustle our stuff and get it to as many people as possible. I was handing out round CoiNz stickers one day. This girl came up to me and kind of bumped into me and I was like “Wow, you wanna have sex, huh?” It turned out she did want to have sex. But before that, I noticed she wasn’t wearing a bra and I was like “Well, if you take your shirt off you can put these stickers on your boobs and it will look great.” She did and she was dead sexy in them. It was the most amazing promotion we could ever get as a band, two CoiNz staring right in your face.
Klone: The perks of being a rock star.

TNT: What is your definition of a poser?
Snapz: It would be someone who doesn’t express themself truly or honestly. I think with anything you do there is a level of honesty that always has to be put into it, especially things creatively. If you’re not speaking from a true place, then I would consider you a poser.
Silky: I feel like it’s somebody who’s trying to be like somebody else and not following what they’re passionate about. Every time you try to be like somebody else, there already is that person, so you’re never going to be that. So stop it.
Benny: Someone who fakes the funk. If you’re truly funky within, you don’t have to fake it. Don’t fake the funk kids.
Button: We love to write produce record our own music all ourselves, the four of us because it is us, it’s what we love to do and that’s who we are. That’s what NBF is. And that’s why people love us because we’re honest, because of that fact. I would say if someone is doing something for the wrong reason, then they’re a poser.

After finishing up the entire Van’s Warped Tour, New Beat Fund will be tour with Blink 182 in September!
9/06 at The Wellmont Theater in Montclair, NJ
9/08 at Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, CT
9/10 at Starland Ballroom in Sayerville, NJ
9/11 at Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, NY
9/12 at Sands Bethlehem Event Center in Bethlehem, PA